Pros

Cons

Prohibitively expensive | Mediocre Battery Life

Bottom Line

It looks stunning, eats games for breakfast and still costs an arm and a leg to own

Oct. 5, 2018Rohith Bhaskar

Dell’s Alienware line of premium gaming laptops have always been pricey, immaculately designed and packed with hardware to chew through any demanding game you throw at it. That sentiment hasn’t changed with the latest revision to the device, it looks stunning, eats games for breakfast and still costs an arm and a leg to own. So let’s dive right in and see what’s new, shall we?

Design

In films, the term “mise-en-scene” describes the design of the visual theme of picture. We normally tend to associate high production values with how everything looks on screen, while that’s not entirely accurate, it’s a fair description of how we perceive the mood the film is trying to set.

If the Alienware 17 were a film, it would be heavily characterised as “Sci-Fi”. The look and feel of the product eschews the modern sensibility of what the future would look like. Its design is sleek but also uses angular and aggressive shapes with a heavy dose of neon to give it a unique aesthetic, something that makes it stand out amongst the sea of gaming laptops in the market. Dell understands that just because this is a device for gamers, it doesn’t mean it has to go “loud” with it’s look.

It neatly amalgamates the “mise-en-scene” of a typical gaming device but tempers it with understated minimalism, walking a fine line between “loud” and “sleek”. The chassis is constructed from premium materials like anodized aluminum, magnesium alloy and a steel mainframe that make it feel really rigid and sturdy.

Dell has also updated it’s thermal technology with thinner blades and a new vapor chamber for the CPU. The spaceship like chassis is also complemented with strips of LEDs at the sides for those lovely yet subtle “neon” accents. These can be customised to any color you want. On top of the lid, is the familiar “tri-section” design with the Alienware logo.

Of course, all of these premium materials and steel reinforcements mean that this device isn’t light. It’s really heavy at almost 4.5kgs and calling it portable is a bit of a stretch. This thing felt like someone shoved gold bars in my bag, when I tried carrying it around for a day and it definitely makes sure that your back knows how heavy it is. I would call this a “desktop replacement”, perfect for someone who wants a tidy setup and doesn’t mind spending a bomb to get it.

The Alienware 17 also has a huge assortment of ports to satiate any I/O needs you may have. There are three SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports (2 Type A and 1 Type C), a 3.5mm headphone jack, Audio out, Killer networks branded RJ-45 Ethernet port, Mini-Display port, HDMI 2.0, Thunderbolt 3 and a proprietary port that allows you to connect a Alienware Graphics Amplifier.

Keyboard, Trackpad and Tobii IR Eye Tracking

When you lift up the lid, you are privy to an equally sleek and well-designed interior. There is a copious amount of space between the keyboard and the trackpad, enough to fit my oversized hands in.

The keyboard is steel-reinforced and full-sized with a numeric keypad, perfect for those migrating from a desktop. Though I am not particularly a fast typer, I managed to score a respectable 70 words per minute on the 10fastfingers test, noticeably higher than my normal 58 to 60 range. The keys themselves feel really great to type on as my fingers cherished the lavishness and springy feel as opposed to my clunky desktop counterpart.

The trackpad is massive too and offered plenty to space for my unusually large fingers. All the Windows 10 gestures I tried worked fine and I had no problems with scrolling or navigating. Of course, both of these are adorned with lights that can be customised by selecting one of 80 quadrillion lighting combinations. They have 13 programmable zones and 20 distinct colors.

Just above the keyboard, is the familiar Alienware head that serves as a power button and just below the display is the Tobii Eye Tracking tech. I will be honest here, I couldn’t really get used to the way it works in game. I tried it through sessions of Rise of The Tomb Raider and Shadow of The Tomb Raider, setting it up to control the camera based on the position of my head and eyes.

It kinda felt clunky and maybe it’s because I am so used to the keyboard and mouse, I instinctively kept trying to control the camera using the mouse, only to realise that I had eye tracking on and was at the receiving end, of a tug of war between the two. You can also set the game to register various actions depending on where you look. Highlighting objects I looked at seemed to work much better, than throwing them where my gaze was.

I can definitely see the appeal though and for what it’s worth, there are a host of sensitivity settings you can play around with, to get it to where it’s comfortable. I guess it just needs more time to get used too.

One thing that is super cool though, is that it integrates with Windows Hello and supports face authentication. It also dims the screen, when you are away and slowly starts it back up, once you’re in front of the display. It’s something that’s really intuitive.

The 1080p webcam is also super sharp, while there are minute hints of grains, overall the image quality is really good and people seemed to agree in the test video chats that were conducted.

Display

The 17.3 inch display houses a TN Panel, which is typically not associated with vibrant colors but the trade-off is the super fast 120Hz refresh rate. Seriously, any motion, even as simple as moving the mouse cursor around is captivating in it’s fluency. It’s also really bright and while it’s not going to beat IPS displays, it’s plenty for everyday use. As expected, colors do look a little muted but to be fair, you would have a hard time telling it apart from a regular panel, if I didn’t tell you what to look for.

Watching films and videos on this is an enjoyable experience, so is playing games. Shadow of The Tomb Raider’s Paititi for instance, resonated with enough vibrance for it’s lush green jungles to stand out, so did a viewing of The Avengers: Rise of Ultron. This panel really shines when it comes to high frame-rate gaming, the 120Hz display combined with a game like DOOM or Overwatch really shows off the fluidity a high refresh rate panel can achieve.

Processor: Intel Core i9-8950HK (Up to 4.80GHz, can be overclocked to 5.0GHz)

Memory: 32GB DDR4 at 2400MHz

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X

Low power Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 630

Storage: Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 1TB SATA, Toshiba XG5-P 1TB SSD

As you might have guessed, that reads like a list of celebrities walking down the red carpet. This machine is a powerhouse. It can chomp down almost anything thrown at it and come back for seconds.

Basic productivity is no problem for this machine, at one point, I tried opening nearly 28 chrome tabs along with a 4K encoded movie file and YouTube all at the same time, the Alienware 17 just laughed at my meek attempts to slow it down and kept chugging along. We tried video editing on Adobe Premiere and besides heavy 8K video files, nothing else slowed this down. All the filters and effects, we applied rendered fast and accurately.

Next up were the games and here too, the Alienware 17 proved that it was capable enough to hold its own against the barrage. We started with something new and that was the recently released Shadow of The Tomb Raider.

A run on PCMark gave us a score of 5417, which was 77% better than all other results and better than an average 4K Gaming PC, which topped out at 5005.

In 3DMark, on the TimeSpy DX12 benchmark, we got a score of 6823, which was again better than 77% of other results and marginally better than an average 4K Gaming PC, which scored 6733. On the Fire Strike Ultra test, which is a DX11 benchmark, the Alienware scored 5006, which was 54% better than other scores. In Fire Strike Extreme, the laptop scored 10,144 points.

Shadow of The Tomb Raider

At 1080p and at max settings with every dial turned up to 11 except anti-aliasing and Vsync, we saw a minimum of 52 and a maximum of 140, with an average framerate hovering around 68 frames per second. At 2560x1440, which is the native resolution of the screen, we saw the minimum dip to 44 and maximum stable at 97, with an average frame rate of 58 frames per second.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

We left all the settings at maximum, turned off MSAA and Vsync and at 1080p, we saw returns of a maximum of 94.5 fps, a minimum of 61.3 and an average frame rate of 76.3 frames per second. At 2560x1440, The minimum dipped to 39.2 fps, maximum held steady at 64.7, while we got an average frame rate of 50.9 frames per second.

Battery

What’s not so great is the battery life, you would probably get around three hours out of it at most and If you push it little a harder, even lesser. To be fair, that’s kind of not the point. With specifications this decked out, I don’t think think anyone expects it to last a long time. Besides, as we stated before, this is not going to be used as a portable laptop. The maximum you will carry this around is from one room to the next. It’s destined to be attached to that charging cable for ever.

Conclusion

Now for the obvious question, how much is all this goodness going to cost me? The short answer is - a lot!

The base version of the device with a Intel Core i7, Windows 10 home, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD, 17.3-inch 2560x1440 display with G-Sync and GeForce GTX 1070 OC is going to burn a hole worth Rs 2,23,244 with GST. The souped up version we got, will cost you Rs 3,42,542. That’s a lot of money but if you have that much to spare and only want the best gaming laptop you can find, then this is well worth your time.

About the Author

Rohith Bhaskar is the Deputy Editor at PCMag India. An unapologetic gamer at heart and a writer by profession. He is best suited to enjoy a hot cuppa in bed and avoids any strenuous physical activities. He currently has an ongoing rivalry with the Office Stairs. See Full Bio